Compromise
by white lotus
Summary: Tseng, and the mission that was doomed to failure from the very start.


**A/N – **It's theory. All theory…

**Compromise**

Even in his currently, considerably short period of service to Shin-Ra as a Turk, Tseng had already been assigned missions similar to this one several times. Personally, he thought he'd handled them fairly well - witnesses scared to death, targets safely "returned" to the company. They were executed and accomplished without a second thought or any degree of difficulty, and to his pleasure, Verdot had commended him.

He had no idea why this particular assignment scared him half to death.

Perhaps it was the fact that he was feeling somewhat inadequate in his suit and tie, still the youngest of the elite force at hardly seventeen years old - but no, that hadn't stopped him before - ... Or perhaps it was the fact that despite being absent from the Sector Five Slums for almost two years now, everything remained eerily unchanged.

Perhaps it was the fact that behind this door was a head full of memories that he'd been fighting with all his might to forget ever since he donned his first black suit and tie.

Perhaps.

He hadn't requested backup - it certainly wasn't necessary - there was nothing here to threaten him besides a mild-mannered widow and a hyperactive little girl. And his conscience.

Clearing his throat and smoothing his jacket (or was he just wiping the sweat from his palms?) for the thirtieth time or so, Tseng braced himself and knocked as politely as he could on the worn wooden door.

Upstairs, a faded curtain flickered, and suddenly, everything was coming back in an almighty rush that left him cornered and breathless.

"Mummy! Mummy, it's Tseng! It's Tseng! See? I told you he'd come back!"

Excited footsteps thundering down the creaky stairs (had they gotten that broken step fixed?), and with an awkward sense of panic, Tseng hurriedly schooled his face into what he hoped would pass for something akin to vacant indifference. Though from _what_ he had to school his expression out of, he positively _feared_ to imagine.

Elmyra seemed slightly smaller, slightly more grey at the temples from where she swept her mouse-brown hair into that neat knot at her nape. The same, sun-bleached plain patched dresses, the same mended apron with the burn in the corner, the same warm, welcoming smile.

Tseng felt his stomach contract with insufferable guilt.

"Won't you come in?"

He hesitated.

All right. Only for a little while.

The house was still the scrubbed wood-panel floors, twisted banister stairs and lop-sided furniture that he remembered from two years prior, splashes of excited colour brightening the otherwise monotone setting through the skilful arrangement of exotic flowers.

You couldn't get these things anywhere in Midgar, not even on the Upper Plate - unless you were a certain brown-haired girl with eyes that were the origin of green, a mouth that got her into more trouble than she was worth and an uncanny knack for growing flowers. And there she was, perhaps somewhat taller than what he could recall, in a light brown dress and a knitted egg-shell blue cardigan to keep out the chill, standing by the stairs and regarding him with an expression that bordered on wary amusement as she seemed to consider whether it'd be all right to approach him.

Part of him wanted to smile and spread his arms for a hug.

Part of him wanted to run, screaming until he lost his voice.

The rest of him just wanted to shut down and forget this assignment ever existed in the first place.

"I hardly recognised you in that suit," Elmyra said as she padded towards the stove to set the kettle. "You look so much older."

No! What was this? _Tea?_ It was time to set this straight - he was here strictly for business.

"I'm sorry, Elmyra, but this isn't a social call."

She turned from the stove, kettle still in hand as her smile faded a little.

"I have orders from Shin-Ra, to retrieve... Company property. I believe you've been in possession of a valuable specimen of Shin-Ra's Department of Science and Biological Research for almost four years now."

He watched unhappily as her confusion grew, not so much at his ambiguous words as at his suddenly cold, detached manner.

"Specimen?"

"Yes." He clasped his hands behind his back, a motion he'd become prone to performing for fear of revealing any nervous habit to those before him. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded educated, artificial, false. "We understand that you discovered her several months after she and her mother were reported missing." We. Not "I". He wasn't an individual anymore - the job description didn't allow that. He was part of a larger whole now.

"Tseng, you don't mean -"

"I do. Aerith Gainsborough."

She was across the room in a heartbeat, arms wrapped protectively about the startled brown-haired girl. "You can't take her away."

Betrayal. Crystal clear and just as sharp, it cut like a razor and left him to bleed, the look in their eyes, screaming _traitor!_ as the pain swallowed them all in a deafening cacophony of silence.

Tseng fought the urge to shut his eyes and turn away.

"We want you to return Aerith to us. We've been looking for her for a very long time."

"No! Never!" Her voice quavered petulantly from the depths of Elmyra's embrace.

"Aerith," he began, and to his horror, his voice broke. Forcing a cough, he tried again. "Aerith. You are a special child, with special blood. Your real mother was an Ancient."

An odd spasm of realisation flitted across Elmyra's face - somehow, she'd almost expected it, yet at the same time, it was still a surprise to hear it spoken at last, and if anything, she tightened her hold on Aerith.

"The Ancients will lead us to a land of supreme happiness," he explained, almost desperate to justify his actions. "Aerith will be able to bring joy and end the suffering for all those in the Slums. That's why Shin-Ra would like her co-operation." He appealed to the green eyes, which were now brimming with tears. "Right, Aerith?"

Her voice pounded against his ears, shrill, as she viciously denied what he'd said. "He's _wrong!_ I'm not an Ancient! I'm _not!_"

_Stop crying. Please stop crying. _

In a brief, bewildered mental fumble, Tseng managed to grasp the only thing that made sense in response to her outburst - a two-second recollection from a moment incredibly mundane: "But... Aerith, don't you hear voices sometimes when you're alone?"

_"No!"_ She shrieked, fighting free of Elmyra. _"I don't, I don't, Idon'tIdon'tIdon't!"_ And with a furious shove, she pushed past him and tore out the door.

"Aerith!"

Odd. Try as he might afterwards, Tseng never figured out whether the voice that called her back was Elmyra's or his own. Reflex gathered his motions before reason arrived to check him, and almost semi-consciously, he found himself starting after her.

"Tseng!"

He turned back, and Elmyra sank into a chair, looking unbearably sad.

"You won't hurt her, will you?"

God, what had _happened _to him in two years? Gut churning a mess of emotion, he swallowed and bowed deeply. "You have my word." And then he ran.

---

As much as he hated to admit it - even as a private confession - the ruined church in the Sector Five Slums gave him the chills: Something about the stained glass and empty pews, alter all but absent after thieves and vandals had their way with the place - all of it gave him goose bumps, and the fact that Aerith had somehow managed to nurture an entire flowerbed in the middle of the collapsed floor did little to ease his nervous state of mind as he tentatively pushed open one of the double doors, wincing at the echo of his footsteps on the grey wooden floorboards.

Nestled amongst the thick of the flower patch, Aerith looked up at the sound before scrambling to her feet and turning to make her escape.

"Aerith, wait -"

"I'm not listening to you!" She cried, clapping her hands over her ears as she bolted for the side of the church, dropped to her hands and knees - and vanished into the wall.

"Aerith?" Tseng rushed to the pew where she had disappeared and found a sort of make-shift cubby hole, created by a fallen pillar that had taken in the inner wall, shielding the niche from immediate view. The entrance was small, hardly large enough to admit the girl's slight figure and Tseng found himself in a strange situation indeed, flat on his stomach on a dusty church floor, sick with the scent of musk and flowers as he attempted in vain to reach her. "Aerith, come out."

"No," she pouted, lip trembling on the verge of what promised to be a noisy bout of tears.

"For god's sake, be reasonable -"

"Go away! I hate you!"

_"Aerith!"_

He'd never been known for being particularly proficient at controlling his temper - somewhere between fear and frustration, something inside of him snapped. This was all that was necessary to trigger the landslide, and next thing he knew, she was sobbing.

Tseng furiously fought the urge to clutch at his head and moan. "Stop! Stop, stop, _stop!_ _Will you just stop cry-"_

_"I hate you!"_ She shrieked, drowning out his demand.

And somehow, this silenced him.

He lay there and watched, speechless as she rocked gently, curled upon herself, hands still pressed to her ears until her sobs died down to hiccoughs.

Softer this time. "Aerith?"

"You promised," she fixed him with a reproachful glare. "You said that if you made it into Shin-Ra you'd come back and keep me safe. You said you'd protect me - you promised, Tseng! I thought you were my friend!"

Winded. He wondered if he shut his eyes and prayed, whether someone would pity him and have him die there and then, just to ease the piercing ache that he couldn't describe as anything but an incredible sadness.

There was the target, there was his job; there were Verdot's expectations, there was the prospect of promotion... There was Aerith.

And Hell, it _hurt._

_Had I really promised those things...?_

But he had, he must have, or things wouldn't have turned out this way - and besides, he'd sworn to Elmyra and he couldn't break any more promises, not now -

He didn't move. He couldn't - suddenly exhausted, he simply lay there, the damp, heady perfume of the yellow and white flowers seeping into his suit as he tried once more, and when his voice broke this time, he didn't bother to correct it.

"Aerith... I'm sorry."

She said nothing.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, hardly audible as his vision blurred on the petals of a drooping white flower. "I'll... Keep my promise. I'll protect you. In anyway I can." A sigh, long and shaky. "But you know... Sometimes, I can't. But I want to." He wanted the blur to go away, so he shut his eyes, and they stung, cold.

Warm, soft fingertips, gentle against his eyelids.

"Then why don't you just do what you want?"

"Because... I'm a Turk."

She gave a small, whimpering sigh, and the emptiness ate it up, all of it, leaving nothing but a dried husk of disappointed petulance. At last that was eaten too, and there remained between them little more than a desperate sort of wistful understanding.

"Tseng?"

He felt her arms, so thin, wrap awkwardly about his shoulders as she lay down beside him and started to cry again.

"Can I still call you 'big brother' sometimes?"

He didn't trust his own voice enough to reply. He didn't trust his own eyes enough to open them. Just let him stay here like this. Forever.

But then she giggled, and for a moment, everything would be all right.

"Your hair is longer. You look stupid."

He laughed.

Just once.

---

She fell asleep with him still caught in her embrace. Tseng suspected that even exhausted after her tantrum she had refused the notion of letting go, and in the end, he had to carry her back to the house, delivering her into the arms of a grateful and relieved Elmyra, to whom he also apologised.

She shook her head. "It's not my forgiveness you seek."

"No," he agreed, already dreading what was to come. "This is the first mission I've failed."

"Then I'll be seeing you again?"

He considered this, calculated the possibilities, counted the sacrifices. "Just... Keep Aerith safe."

Verdot wasn't going to approve of this at all.

But even as he turned away from the door, he found himself miserably scrabbling for remnants of the afternoon amongst the confused jumble of his mind.

_I miss you._

Which one of them had said that?

---

**A/N - **Tseng. Has mood-swings. I read somewhere that as a younger Turk, he'd always had issues with keeping his cool, so I hope that excuses his somewhat OOC behaviour here. I haven't much knowledge where Tseng's past is concerned, and I keep coming across disparities in information where his superior is concerned: Was his hame Veld or Verdot? The rest is purely speculation, so if you read this and thought, "This doesn't fit", then think of it as… AU. Or something. ;

I've always thought of Tseng and Aerith's relationship as odd: There had to be _some_ reason she was able to evade the Turks for so long. So I came up with this – she must have had one of them on her side.


End file.
